Meaning
The time, energy, or mental capacity available to take on a task, as when someone says they do or do not have room for more work. It began as an engineering measurement of signal or data capacity, and in its figurative sense it is casual workplace talk, often mocked as corporate jargon. Casual workplace register; extremely common, and often used self-consciously or parodied as corporate speak. Regional use: General English; strongest in workplace and tech contexts.
Origin
Documented history: bandwidth entered engineering vocabulary in the early twentieth century as the range of frequencies a radio channel could carry, then passed into computing for data capacity. A 2024 Medium survey of corporate jargon, drawing on a list maintained by former Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson, notes the word was plucked from electrical engineering and radio operating into meeting-room speech, where it now rivals signal-to-noise as a video-call cliché; by 2017 Comstock's magazine was already glossing it as a stock business buzzword for the energy, mental capacity, or manpower a project needs. The figurative step from channel capacity to human attention is usually described as a migration through 1990s and 2000s tech-industry offices, but the exact first figurative use is not pinned down in standard references, so that timing is inference rather than record.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- emotional bandwidth
- low bandwidth
- mental bandwidth
- no bandwidth
Usage Examples
- I would love to join the committee, but I just do not have the bandwidth this quarter.
- Ask Priya instead; she has more bandwidth for new projects right now.
- After the move, my emotional bandwidth was so low that I cancelled every social plan for a month.